I have been using Framework Manager for many years and noticed that my model kept growing even when I was removing content. Framework Manager has the ability to replay transactions in order to rebuild a Framework Model from the logs if it was to get corrupted. The downside of this is that all that history is stored even though you may not need it or even want it. My Framework Model I was working with had grown to 50mb over 2 years. Although I am aware 50mb these days is insignificant when you are talking about storage, this is rather large for a Framework Model. My Framework Model was stored on a network location and when working remotely it took a long time to edit and even save. As a result, I wanted to reduce its size to make it more manageable.

I managed to reduce the size of the Framework Model to 12mb from 50mb generating an impressive 76% saving on size, plus, improving performance when editing and saving.

In order to reduce the size of the framework model follow the steps below:

Locate your framework model and look at the files inside the folder. You should see .XML files and a .CPF file similar to the screenshot below:

As you can see from the screenshot above the IDLog.xml is 8 Mb and the log.xml file is 30 Mb. This is what is causing my Framework Model to be so large. The IDLog.xml file tracks objects for models that use branching and merging whereas the log.xml file stores all the transactions or changes made to the model. This is in effect a change history of your Framework Package. Please NOTE if you delete log.xml and your model gets corrupted you will not be able to rebuild your Framework Model by running the script of your transactions. If this is a concern you can archive off these log files using the “Archive log file” option but this will still take up space on the file system. If you do not need the history I recommend you remove it

Open up the Framework Model where the files were deleted. Saving the model without making a change will automatically re-create the log.xml file. Making a simple change and saving the model will re-create the IDLog.xml file. The screenshot below shows the files re-created but rather than a combined 38 Mb they are now 3kb.

That concludes the steps for reducing the size of your Framework Manager model.

Framework Models will continue to grow whether you are adding or removing items from the model. It is useful to know how to shrink your model especially if you are unlikely to use any of the historical transactions.